Dr. Greg Colvin Said Ether Price Can Go Up and Down, It Is More Fuel Than Money

Dr. Greg Colvin who works on the Ethereum Virtual Machine has identified a key factor that distinguishes Ethereum from Bitcoin and a number of other altcoins.

Speaking on the implications of Ethereum on society in an interview shot at the Devcon 2 conference, he said there exists a factor that makes Ethereum more than just a form of money:

“For me and for a lot of people, Ether is just what makes Ethereum run. We don’t really care if it is money. I don’t care day to day what the value of Ether is. Whether it goes up or down, it’s just the fuel that runs the machine. What’s interesting are the things you can do with it.”

The EVM runs little pieces of codes that enable users to do their projects on the platform such as ideas that would not have been possible without a programmable Blockchain, Colvin says.

Drawing a parallel between Ethereum and the early days of the Internet, Colvin notes that Ethereum is not starting from scratch unlike how it was for the Internet. He also noted that Ethereum’s make up is a lot more millennial than it was.

He says in the interview:

“It was a relatively small number of technical people back then with the Internet but they were very senior people. It seems a pretty young crowd jumped on this. I don’t know what the average is but it seems like the mid-20s sometimes. There are advantages to that. There’s just a huge amount of enthusiasm and energy. That’s the good side and I think we’ve seen a lot of that as people are doing things we just didn’t know were possible. It’s a powerful technology that will make a difference but it’s unfortunately not up to the technologist to know what that is.”

This interview series was produced by Status, with the help of some bright minds from within the Ethereum community. The focus of this series is primarily on how to explain Ethereum to a non-technical audience. It also touches upon Ethereum projects. The series was shot entirely at Devcon 2, Ethereum’s annual developer conference, which drew 700 attendees from all over the world.